


After the Ball is Over

by betweenthebliss



Category: Carnivale
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betweenthebliss/pseuds/betweenthebliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years later, Libby goes looking for home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Ball is Over

**Author's Note:**

> written for [this photo prompt](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/killerbeautiful/after-the-ball-prompt.jpg) at 'random-fic-is-random' @ dreamwidth.

In the summer of 1943, Libby Jones goes west.

She's looking for something, someone, a family she hasn't seen since her foolish youth. Ten years, it's been. Her son is eight. Her daughter starts school in the fall. Libby knows she should be there-- but this is something she has to do, has to do the way she knew she had to get off the circuit before she woke up one morning and found herself an old woman bouncing around the back of a bright-painted truck with only the carousel horses for company.

Clayton understands. He tells her without words. Buys her train ticket and has her write down everything he'll need to know to take care of Dora and Benny in her absence. Benny looks at her with wide-eyed seriousness and asks Mama, why do you have to go away? She doesn't know how to answer him.

On the train she gets a window seat. Her skirt brushes her calves and her hat hides her face when she turns it toward the glass. She watches the green New England spring pass by and thanks God for water. She doesn't like Boston; it's a big city to her eyes and everyone talks so damn fast. But she can't think of a place further from the dusty desert of her youth, and so she calls it home and hopes eventually it'll feel like one.

It's two days to Wichita, where she'll rent a truck and drive the circuit until she finds them. It's early on in the season, and even with a decade's distance stretching between now and her carnie days, she remembers.

She steps off the train and onto the platform. A dust cloud rises up and blinds her, and she's choking on the taste of magic and fear. _Pick your number_, Samson's voice echoes in her mind. _I can heal him,_ Ben Hawkins says. Sofie's dark eyes bore into her soul.

"Ma'am, are you okay?" The conductor at her elbow startles her, and she lowers her gloved hand from her eyes. Forces a pretty smile. That's easy to remember, too.

"I'm just fine-- the dust got in my eye, that's all." She picks up her suitcase and her heels make hollow sounds on the boards beneath her feet as she walks away.

The truck is old and there's something wrong with the engine, but it'll hold out 'til she can get to where she's going. Driving alone isn't scary; she's got Clayton's pistol in her purse, and anyway, she knows no harm's gonna come to her. Since Ben Hawkins put his healer's hands on her husband, they've been right as rain. Sounds a silly explanation, but there's nothin' else makes sense to Libby's way of thinking-- how else could you explain Clayton gettin' a job so fast, their kids growin' up healthy as horses without even a day of colic or cough? She thinks of California, and hopes Ben knows that whatever else he may've done, the Jones family of Boston owes him their happiness.

After three days without even a trail to follow she starts to get nervous. After a week of the same she has to fight to keep from admitting she's scared. Not for herself-- for them. For her mama and daddy, for Samson and Ruthie and Lila. What would they do if the outfit broke up? Libby's got no idea-- but she sure as shit knows most of 'em wouldn't have the same kinda luck she and Clayton did.

It's been eleven days on the road when she sees it in the distance-- the ferris wheel stark and motionless against the dirt-colored sky. Hardly distinctive; any outfit worth its salt has one, and they're all the same, but still, she knows. Her foot guns the pedal to the floor, and the little truck rattles as it eats up the distance between Libby and her childhood home.

She sees something's wrong before she's half a mile away.

The thing about being a carnie was you were never alone, not really. Home was always moving and someone was always moving in it, even in the dead hours of night. But nothing stirs on the surface of the carnival as she draws near; no sign of human or animal movement, barely a breath of wind teasing the pennants still strung from the lightposts.

The carnival is dead. She sees it as she parks the truck and leaves the door open, running out into the still air that seems to eat up her voice as she calls out for people she knows are long gone. She walks through the trailers and stages, around the carousel and the platform where a thousand men had pitted their strength against Gabriel's. In the mess tent the plates are stacked neat beside an empty pot on a cold stove, and a shutter on Ruthie's trailer bangs in the wind that rises, suddenly, and whips around her like an embrace.

It is, she thinks, as if they all simply vanished into thin air.

The wind picks up again, swirling around her ankles and Libby hears the ghost of music in its echoes. Dust floats on the air, the dry taste still so familiar, and she squeezes her eyes shut, her small fists clenching at her sides. A whine like sizzling spotlights makes her insides buzz, and her eyelids are suddenly thick with tears. "No," she whispers, and doesn't know whether she's talking to herself or to the presence she feels brushing her mind, riding the wind like soft fingers on her skin. The back of her neck prickles as a warm gust like a breath caresses her, and she rolls her head into the feeling before she remembers there are only two people in the world who know how she likes that.

Her eyes snap open and she's running, running hell-for-leather for the truck, and she scrambles to get the key in the ignition while her heart pounds wildly in her ears. She gets it going, then, the engine turning over with a cough and a rattle, and she turns a donut with the wheels squealing in protest, speeds away with her foot pressed all the way to the floor.

In the rearview mirror, the landscape is flat and empty, and it's twenty miles before Libby can get the sound of Sofie's dark and velvet laughter out of her mind.


End file.
